Performance Reviews that Don't Suck

Many in the agile community suggest abandoning performance reviews, but few offer suggestions for alternatives. A large percentage of software developers work in an enterprise environment where performance reviews are mandated. What if you could do performance reviews that will honor agile values and not only suck less, but actually provide value to the individual and the organization? We have rolled out such a system successfully with strong support across the enterprise--from the individual colleagues, to people leaders, and even including HR. We will demonstrate the principles and the specific implementation of our system which you can tailor to your organization’s values and constraints.

Outline/Structure of the Case Study

This talk is based on an approach to performance management that Todd has used for over 15 years at a Fortune 500 organization, and which was recently rolled out successfully across several business lines in a mid-sized enterprise.

Challenges of Performance Reviews

Downfalls of SMART objectives

Exercise – breakout to discuss what has worked and what challenges people have faced

Explanation of the approach we took

Normalizing Job descriptions

Core Responsibilities

Enrolling HR support

Fitting into the existing infrastructure

Rollout to People Leaders and to Colleagues

Results

People Leader feedback

Colleague feedback

Exercise

Case study of an individual and performances. Team to discuss and provide performance review.

Challenges

Fitting in to legacy

Learning Outcome

How to go about designing a performance management system that honors agile values and actually provides value to both the organization and the individuals.